Internet Protocol version 6 is the latest version of the Internet Protocol, the communications protocol that provides an identification and location system for computers on networks and routes traffic across the Internet. IPv6 was developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force to deal with the long-anticipated problem of IPv4 address exhaustion. IPv6 is intended to replace IPv4.
Every device on the Internet is assigned an IP address for identification and location definition. With the rapid growth of the Internet after commercialization in the 1990s, it became evident that far more addresses than the IPv4 address space has available were necessary to connect new devices in the future. By 1998, the Internet Engineering Task Force had formalized the successor protocol. IPv6 uses a 128-bit address, allowing 2¹²⁸, or approximately 3.4×10^38 addresses, or more than 7.9×10^28 times as many as IPv4, which uses 32-bit addresses and provides approximately 4.3 billion addresses. The two protocols are not designed to be interoperable, complicating the transition to IPv6. However, several IPv6 transition mechanisms have been devised to permit communication between IPv4 and IPv6 hosts.